Meta Breach Incident Score: Analysis & Impact (MET4532045112025)

In this Rankiteo incident briefing, we review the Meta breach identified under incident ID MET4532045112025.

The analysis begins with a detailed overview of Meta's information like the linkedin page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/meta, the number of followers: 11513481, the industry type: Software Development and the number of employees: 140153 employees

After the initial compromise, the video explains how Rankiteo's incident engine converts technical details into a normalized incident score. The incident score before the incident was 732 and after the incident was 730 with a difference of -2 which is could be a good indicator of the severity and impact of the incident.

In the next step of the video, we will analyze in more details the incident and the impact it had on Meta and their customers.

WhatsApp (Meta Platforms, Inc.) recently reported "Largest Data Leak in History: WhatsApp User Data Enumeration Exploit", a noteworthy cybersecurity incident.

Researchers in Austria exploited a flaw in WhatsApp to gather personal data of over 3.5 billion users by abusing the platform's phone number lookup feature.

The disruption is felt across the environment, affecting WhatsApp user database, and exposing phone numbers, user names and profile images (where available), with nearly 3.5 billion+ records at risk.

Formal response steps have not been shared publicly yet.

The case underscores how and recommending next steps like Implement strict rate limiting on phone number lookup features, Enhance monitoring for automated enumeration attempts and Conduct privacy impact assessments for features enabling user data access.

Finally, we try to match the incident with the MITRE ATT&CK framework to see if there is any correlation between the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK framework.

The MITRE ATT&CK framework is a knowledge base of techniques and sub-techniques that are used to describe the tactics and procedures of cyber adversaries. It is a powerful tool for understanding the threat landscape and for developing effective defense strategies.

Rankiteo's analysis has identified several MITRE ATT&CK tactics and techniques associated with this incident, each with varying levels of confidence based on available evidence. Under the Initial Access tactic, the analysis identified Active Scanning: Vulnerability Scanning (T1595.002) with moderate to high confidence (85%), supported by evidence indicating abuse of platform feature (phone number lookup), 63 billion phone numbers generated via automated tool. Under the Collection tactic, the analysis identified Data from Local System (T1005) with high confidence (95%), with evidence including harvest personal data such as phone numbers, names, profile images via lookup feature, and 100 million accounts enumerated per hour and Data from Information Repositories: Personal User Data (T1213.002) with high confidence (90%), with evidence including exploited WhatsApp user database via phone number lookup, and 3.5 billion+ user records exposed (PII). Under the Exfiltration tactic, the analysis identified Exfiltration Over Command and Control Channel (T1041) with moderate to high confidence (80%), with evidence including data exfiltration via automated enumeration (100M accounts/hour), and custom tool built on Google’s libphonenumber for scraping. Under the Defense Evasion tactic, the analysis identified Virtualization/Sandbox Evasion: Rate Limiting Avoidance (T1497.003) with high confidence (95%), supported by evidence indicating lack of rate-limiting or blocking mechanisms enabled mass enumeration without detection. Under the Reconnaissance tactic, the analysis identified Gather Victim Identity Information (T1590) with high confidence (90%), with evidence including scraped phone numbers, names, profile images for 3.5B+ users, and information weaponized for phishing/spam and Gather Victim Identity Information: Phone Number (T1590.005) with high confidence (95%), with evidence including 63 billion phone numbers generated via libphonenumber, and phone number lookup feature abused to enumerate users. These correlations help security teams understand the attack chain and develop appropriate defensive measures based on the observed tactics and techniques.